Health worker is first HIPAA privacy violator to get jail time
Under the new penalties adding "teeth" to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), SC Magazine has reported that a former UCLA Health System employee, apparently disgruntled over an impending firing, has been sentenced to four months in federal prison after pleading guilty in January to illegally snooping into patient records.
However, it's not just employees snooping that should have those in health care security concerned. In a recent audit of a health care institution using Websense Web Security, "auditors discovered that some of the company's PCs were infected with malware as a result of employees visiting web sites that, well, they shouldn't have. One PC was even sending small amounts of data to a Russian web site, apparently the result of a botnet attack." You can read more about that audit over on HealthcareInfoSecurity.com.
With Web access of employees and patient information of primary concern, hospital and health care IT professionals will need to increasingly look to both secure the Web and protect their sensitive data. Click here to read more about how the Websense Web Security Gateway, with integrated TruWeb DLP™ can help protect your organization from real-time threats and data loss.
